The Red and Black

By MARK NIESSE Staff Writer

Tim Garrett said he got far more out of spring break than a tan and a hangover by working with the Boys and Girls Club in Knoxville, Tenn.

"I learned a lot of leadership skills and had a lot of contact with children," said Garrett, a junior from Marietta. "I learned how much sadness they hide inside every day."

Students like Garrett deviate from the mainstream college experience, preferring to participate in Alternative Spring Break projects that take them to sites around the Southeast for a variety of service programs.

From Nashville, Tenn., to a preserve at Appalachicola Bluffs and Ravines, Fla., these students spent their breaks working to clean up the environment, ease the burden of urban poverty and improve life in refugee communities.

Each of the seven Alternative Spring Break ventures, sponsored by Communiversity, had two site leaders coordinating 10 to 16 participants.

"Alternative Spring Break gives you hands-on knowledge of urban poverty," said Kelley O'Brien, a senior from Marietta who worked in Savannah to "weed up crime and violence and plant a seed for urban renewal."

O'Brien was a site leader working with the Weed and Seed program, a project that created a "passive" park with a garden and walkways, but no swing sets.

"We couldn't make it too comfortable or else it would become a drinking area," O'Brien said. "We found crack pipes, broken glass, bones and kitchen knives while we were building the garden."

Site leader David Andrews, a senior from Columbus, worked with refugees In Nashville, Tenn. He met Bosnians, Iraqis, Cubans and Somalians who fled their native lands, where they were persecuted because of religion or political thought.

Andrews and his group of students labored to help out the refugees in their day-to-day lives.

"Refugees come over to America and get put in not the nicest of neighborhoods. They're poor and they don't know the language," Andrews said. "They're helping the neighborhood get better, especially because a lot of them are Muslims who take their morals and values with them."

At Appalachicola Bluffs and Ravines, students helped restore forest land cleared about 80 years ago by lumber companies.

This team worked with The Nature Conservancy, which restores long-needle pine trees native to that area.

"We worked with inmates from the Florida minimum-security prison system," said Rick Hanson, a sophomore from Forsyth who worked at the site. "I was really surprised that they were cool. They were just happy to be outside prison walls."

Hanson, who wants to make a career of working with wildlife, used the trip to find out if he'd want to do similar work after graduation.

"The trip helped bring things into perspective," Hanson said. "I wanted to make sure this was something I wanted to do."

Students paid $65 to $85 to go on the trips, but the ideal is that one day the University will pay for them, O'Brien said.

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